Planetary Ornament Set – Celebrate home for the holidays! Set of 9 glass ornaments that look like the planets in our solar system and yes, we included Pluto – if you don’t believe, just leave it in the box.
The post Planetary Ornament Set appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.
Movie nights just got better! Now you can enjoy your favorite movies in the highest quality possible on Google Play Movies & TV—without ever leaving your couch.
Check out the full scoop on what’s new in the U.S. and Canada:
Movies you own will automatically be upgraded to 4K, on us:When 4K titles are available from participating Hollywood studios, we’ll upgrade your past movie purchases so you can stream in 4K, even if you originally bought the movie in SD or HD. It’s all on us, just open the Play Movies & TV app and we’ll let you know which titles have been upgraded.
Pay less for 4K movies:Starting today, most 4K movies on Google Play will cost you less, so you have more options to enjoy upgraded movies. Get started by browsing our top 4K titles.
Bring 4K to your TV: You shouldn’t need to buy an additional device to watch your 4K movies on the 4K TV you already own. In addition to 4K Sony Bravia TVs, you can now watch in 4K using the Play Movies & TV app on most 4K Samsung Smart TVs, and we’re working on adding support for LG as well.
Enjoy updated designs to our smart TV app:We’ve updated our app for Samsung, LG and Vizio TVs with a modern look and feel to provide a better experience.
We think watching in 4K should be a no brainer, so we’re continuously working to make that a reality. With Google Play, it’s now easier than ever for you to watch movies in the best quality possible, no matter which device you're using. And it doesn't stop here, we'll continue to make improvements so you can sit back, relax and enjoy your favorite movies, whenever and wherever.
Ten years ago, we introduced the first version of the Android operating system with the T-Mobile G1, and launched Android Market (now Google Play) the very same day. Android has grown up a lot since then—there are now more than 2 billion active Android devices around the world.
The operating system itself has gone through some major transformations, too. The G1 ran on Android 1.0—a version so early, we didn’t even name it after a dessert. The debut included features that you know and love today like pull-down notifications, sharing content across apps and multitasking between apps. But it didn’t have more advanced features like voice search, turn-by-turn navigation or NFC. 10 years later, we’ve come a long way! Our latest release of the operating system, Android 9 Pie, has all of those features and harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to make your phone smarter, simpler and more adaptive.
On the occasion of Android’s 10th birthday, we’re taking a trip down memory lane to look at the earliest versions of Android, the major improvements of each release and how far we’ve come:
With the introduction of virtual keyboards, Cupcake opened the doors to full touchscreen Android devices. And with home screen app widgets, you had more ways to customize your device, a defining feature still used today, alongside app folders. Sharing directly from your smartphone became easier with more ways to copy and paste and the ability to capture, share and upload videos.
Google Maps navigation made Android smartphones, well, smart. Turn-by-turn directions using Google Maps data included many features found in a typical in-car navigation system: a forward-looking 3D view, voice guidance and traffic information—all for free on your high resolution phone. Eclair also added speech-to-text transcription, which lets you input text like emails and messages with your voice.
We also introduced a fan favorite feature: live wallpapers.
Froyo took Android voice capabilities to the next level with Voice Actions, which let you perform key functions on your phone—searching, getting directions, making notes, setting alarms and more—with just the sound of your voice. Sounds familiar…
Gingerbread helped you get the most out of your battery life by knowing exactly how your device was using it, from screen brightness to any active app. With Android 9, we’ve taken battery life management to a whole new level with Adaptive Battery, which uses AI to learn the apps you use most and prioritize battery for them.
Honeycomb’s new Holo design language, along with larger layout and rich animation support, made the most of your tablet’s screen. This was the first version of Android that was intended for different form factors, laying the groundwork for more robust and flexible platforms introduced later, like Android TV, Android Auto, Android Things and Wear OS by Google.
Navigation became more intuitive with the arrival of quick settings and the ability to swipe to dismiss recent apps and notifications, features first introduced in tablets with Honeycomb, brought to phones. This release reflected a renewed focus on creating fluid experiences in Android—an effort that continues to this day with intuitive gestures in Android 9.
A precursor to the Google Assistant, Google Now in Jelly Bean helped you get the information you needed at just the right time—like the daily weather as you got dressed and commute times before you walked out the door. Notifications became richer, allowing you to expand them to show more content and immediately take actions, such as liking a post, archiving an email or even blocking future notifications.
With Lollipop, we brought Material Design to Android, introducing an entirely new look and feel that made it easier to navigate your device. Material Design is a visual language that combines the classic principles of good design with the innovation of technology and science. Lollipop also made it more seamless to transition across the devices that you use throughout the day, so that you can pick up where you left off across Android phones, tablets, TV and wearables.
To help save your juice for the things that matter most, Marshmallow brought some new battery saving features: Doze, which automatically puts your device into a sleep state when it’s at rest, and App Standby, which limits the impact of less frequently used apps on battery life.
We also introduced run-time permissions, which help users better understand and evaluate requests for apps to have access to certain data.
Nougat focused on improvements to the ways you were already using your phone—adding multi-window to let you run two apps side by side, instant reply within notifications, adjustable display size for improved accessibility, and Data Saver which limits how much data your devices uses on background. We also introduced VR mode to enable high-quality VR experiences for apps, and 63 new emoji that focus on better gender representation—in all six skin tone options. �
Oreo introduced ways to navigate tasks on your phone more seamlessly, like picture-in-picture, and Autofill, which helps you log into your apps faster. Oreo also continued to simplify the Android experience with more visual cohesion and easier gestures—like swiping up from the homescreen to see all your apps.
And with Oreo (Go edition), we built our first-ever configuration of Android specifically optimized for entry-level devices, ensuring that first-time smartphone users get a fast, powerful experience.
The way we use our phones—and how much time we spend on them—has changed a lot since the days of Cupcake. So one of the biggest changes in Android 9 Pie is the introduction of new ways for you to take control of your digital wellbeing, including a new app timer and a dashboard that lets you see how much time you spend in various apps. With Android 9, your phone also changes the way it works by learning from you—and working better for you—the more you use it. Artificial intelligence now powers core capabilities of your phone, from predicting your next task so you can jump right into the action you want to take to prioritizing battery power for the apps you use most and the ones it thinks you are going to use soon.
From the early days of Voice Actions with speech-to-text to an increasingly helpful smartphone with AI at its core, Android has continued to evolve over the past 10 years. And thanks to our open-source platform and the passionate community of users, partners and developers, Android has empowered innovations and given people access to the power of mobile technology.
We're excited to announce the release of GitLab 11.4 with incredible updates to help teams work together more efficiently. Most teams adopting DevOps are focused on shortening cycle time, so improvements that reduce waste and extra work are welcome contributions toward faster delivery and better business results.
With GitLab 11.4 we're making code reviews more efficient with Merge Request Reviews and a file tree for diffs. We are introducing Feature Flags in alpha. Auto DevOps and CI is more powerful with PostgreSQL migrations and timed incremental rollout. Even Git is faster with support for Git protocol v2.
Merge Request Reviews will reduce the noise from comments on code and merge requests. Batch Comments lets a reviewer enter multiple comments on the code or merge request and then finalize them in one batch. Now, the people subscribed to the project can more efficiently keep track of changes.
Having the right people review and approve code changes is a key step to delivering high-quality code.
Building on Code Owners from the 11.3 release,
GitLab can now suggest who should review and approve a specific merge request based on the
CODEOWNERS file. This way, you can quickly and efficiently get changes reviewed and approved.
This will also be useful when defining separation of duties and roles on a team, where you want to
have defined reviewers for certain parts of the code.
The addition of the file tree view to the merge request makes it easier and faster for reviewers to navigate through multiple changed files and then provide their feedback.
Russell Levy, co-founder and CTO of Chorus.ai, explains how the reviews and file-tree view features are helping their team:
We're pretty thorough in code reviews and there are generally 10-20 comments on a medium-sized merge request, plus a few rounds of conversations based on it. Using the review feature reduces the noise and interruptions during the review process.
For larger merge requests, the new file tree and diffs feature makes reviews that much faster, as it makes it easy to jump around the code to understand dependencies.
We are introducing an Alpha version of Feature Flags, a feature toggle system. Teams can now practice Continuous Delivery by deploying new features to production in small batches, mitigating risk before a full rollout.
We're also updating the ability for all users to take advantage of having
Include files in their .gitlab-ci.yml files, moving it from Starter to Core. This will make it easier
for all teams to leverage this best practice and more efficiently manage their CI/CD pipelines.
Together with the wider GitLab community, there are many more wonderful improvements
we have included in this release including a new profile layout, faster access to
your profile status, highlighted @mentions, new quick actions, and the ability
to close epics.
Read on to learn more about all the great features in GitLab 11.4.
Join us for an upcoming event Sign up for the 11.4 Release Radar webcast
Luke added the ability to download 2FA recovery codes as a file, making them easier to backup. 2FA recovery codes are needed to access your GitLab account if you lose access to your phone or one time password secret.
Thank you, Luke for your contribution!
Code review in merge requests is a powerful feature in GitLab. Team members have conversations linked to specific lines of code in a diff, and can even resolve them. However, the process can get unwieldy in merge requests with large diffs. Often, a reviewer may need to leave upwards of 10 or more comments in a single sitting. And the 9th or 10th comment may actually render earlier comments unnecessary. The end result is that the merge request author gets a slew of notifications and has to sort them out one by one.
With this release, we are introducing Merge Request Reviews. This will allow a reviewer to draft as many code comments in a merge requests as they wish, make sure they are all consistent, and then submit them all as a single action. Since the drafts are saved to GitLab, a reviewer can even spread their work over many sessions, say starting a review on their desktop at work during the day, and then wrapping it up at home on their tablet device later in the evening. Once the draft comments are submitted, they appear as normal individual comments. This allows individual team members the flexibility to do code review however they want, but still being compatible with the entire team.
In future iterations, we will improve the feature to provide a preview before the batch submit action, and also combine all those notifications that those comments currently generate, into one batched notification.
This feature gives you the ability to create and manage feature flags for your software directly in the product. Simply create a new feature flag, validate it using the simple API instructions in your software, and you have the ability to control the behavior of your software in the field via the feature flag within GitLab itself.
Feature Flags offer a feature toggle system for your application. They enable teams to achieve Continuous Delivery by deploying new features to production in smaller batches for controlled testing, separating feature delivery from customer launch. This helps reduce risk, and allows you to easily manage which features to enable.
Note that this is an alpha feature being introduced for the first time, so while we encourage you to check out the feature and provide feedback, we want you to be aware that the implementation could change in subsequent releases.
Code review is an essential practice of every successful project, but knowing what has changed can be hard to determine from a flat list of diffs. GitLab now includes a searchable file tree of changes to make it easy to see which files have changed and jump between them.
The file tree summarizes the structure and size of the change, similar
to diff-stats, providing an overview of the change and improving
navigation between diffs. Search allows reviewers to limit their code
review to a subset of files by path or filetype, simplifying reviews by
specialists focussed on only a subset of the merge request.
Previously the list of changed files was available through a searchable drop down, that was best suited to jumping to a specific file.
Knowing who is the best person to review your changes isn’t always obvious. Code owners are now shown as suggested approvers when creating or editing a merge request to make assigning the right person easy.
Support for defining code owners was introduced in GitLab 11.3. In upcoming releases, code owners will be further integrated into the merge request workflow with automatic assignment and required approvals.
No matter how engaged you are on GitLab, your activity is a relevant source of information and engagement indicator, displayed right at your personal profile page. Your personal profile should give a simple insight into what you are interested in and working on.
With this release, we introduce a redesigned profile page overview, showing your activity via the familiar but shortened contribution graph with your latest activities and your most relevant personal GitLab projects.
With GitLab 11.2 we introduced personal status messages for the first time, allowing you to share your current availability, mood, or simply your favorite animal.
With this release, we make setting your status even more simple and frictionless. A new “Set status” item in your user menu provides a fresh modal that allows you to set and clear your status right within context. In addition, your set status is also shown in your user menu, on top of your full name and user name, including set Emoji and message.
.gitlab-ci.yml from Starter to Core
We are very happy to announce in this release that the usage of
includes within the .gitlab-ci.yml is now available in Core. This
will help ensure templates and other shared resources are always
compatible between free and non-free users, and also unlocks the
ability for everyone to do best-practice development using reusable
snippets in your CI/CD pipelines.
only/except for modifications on a path or file
A popularly requested feature, we’re proud to now offer the
ability within the .gitlab-ci.yml to use only/except rules for jobs
based on when modifications occur to a specific file or path (glob).
This will allow more control for users whose repositories contain different kinds of assets or builds, ensuring only the appropriate steps are executed for the kinds of changes that were committed, speeding up overall pipeline execution.
You’ve had the ability within Auto DevOps to setup incremental rollouts for a while now, and with this release, we are adding an option to also set up timed incremental rollouts where the rollout will automatically continue on a timed cadence unless there is some error.
Security is paramount when setting up your infrastructure for the first time or connecting to existing one. Role-based access control (RBAC) was made generally available as part of Kubernetes’ 1.8 release, providing more granular controls to regulate access to Kubernetes resources.
Our Kubernetes integration will now offer the capability to either create an RBAC-enabled cluster on GKE or to connect with an existing cluster that is RBAC-enabled, providing increased security for your infrastructure.
Auto DevOps now supports interacting with and deploying applications to RBAC-enabled Kubernetes clusters.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is an important tool that allows operators to ensure the reliability, security, and efficiency of their Kubernetes cluster. Using Auto DevOps in conjunction with an RBAC-enabled cluster ensures your applications take advantage of the increased infrastructure security.
Using Auto DevOps to automatically detect, build, test, deploy, and monitor your application just got more powerful. Starting in 11.4, Auto DevOps now provides the ability to initialize or migrate PostgreSQL databases in your project.
Simply define a project variable to initialize or migrate your PostgreSQL database, and Auto DevOps will do the rest.
Labels in GitLab are very powerful since they can be applied to issues, merge requests, and epics. As you use more labels, it can be difficult to maintain them.
In a recent previous release, we added the ability to search by labels on the project labels list page. With this release, you can now search by labels, sort by name/created at/updated at, and even see a list of labels you have subscribed to. This is available both in group and project labels list pages.
Merge requests are a core part of GitLab, allowing team members to collaborate on code transparently. In particular, we encourage teams to share their work early, and use the WIP (work in progress) feature to indicate that a merge request is still undergoing active work and should not be merged yet.
With this release, we’re making it easier for users to differentiate between WIP and non-WIP merge requests by having a dedicated filter in both group-level and project-level merge requests lists. This allows users to quickly focus in on merge requests that are still in their early stages of work, versus those that are toward the final stages of review before merge.
@mentions for yourself distinctly
When collaborating in a long discussion in an issue or merge request, often many users are involved, making it difficult to quickly at a glance, see comments that are directed at you.
With this release, @mentions for yourself (i.e. the current user), are highlighted
in a different color, allowing you to easily see which comments involve you,
helping you focus on them quickly.
GitLab supports GitLab Flavored Markdown (GFM) in most places throughout GitLab where you enter text, providing the power of rich formatting with a simple syntax. In particular, you can create tables in GFM. Previously, this was painful to use, especially for large tables, since you had to type a lot of characters or paste in a previous table just to format it the way you want. Similarly, GFM also supports URL links. But sometimes you may forget the particular syntax.
With this release, you can now click on the table button in the GFM editor, and this will automatically insert a table for you. You can then easily enter table values or extend the table, formatting it just the way you want. You can use this in description and comment boxes all throughout GitLab.
You can now also click on the link button, and this will generate the URL link syntax skeleton for you. Allowing you to quickly paste in a link and write the name of it.
Thank you George Tsiolis for the table contribution!
Thank you Jan Beckmann for the URL link contribution!
Burndown Charts help teams track work, as it progresses throughout a milestone. Usually, the scope of work is decided and agreed on before the milestone begins. But occasionally, there will be important exceptions to the rule, (such as an emergency bug or security fix) and new scope needs to be included, in the form of new issues.
With this release, burndown charts now accounts for these new issues that are created in the middle of a milestone, resulting in an uptick of its line.
In a previous release, we expanded the allowable values of issue weight from a small number to effectively unlimited, any number greater than zero.
With this release, we’ve brought this flexibility to the issues API as well, allowing users to set this field with the newly expanded number range with the API.
Locking discussions in issues and merge requests is helpful to direct conversations to newer issues (or merge requests). It can also be used to control abusive or otherwise unproductive behavior.
With this release, we now have quick actions to lock and unlock discussions, making it easier to type a comment and lock/unlock all one action.
Thank you Mehdi Lahmam for the contribution!
Similar to issues and merge requests, you can now close (and re-open) epics in GitLab. The epics list now has the Open, Closed, and All tabs, just like issues. So when you have completed all the work in an epic, or it is no longer relevant, you can close it, and it won’t appear anymore in the default list view.
You can close (and re-open) an epic via buttons on the epic, via quick actions in an epic comment, and also via the API, exactly like issues.
Depending on your responsibilities, administrating GitLab can provide a very complex challenge due to all things GitLab offers.
With this release, we improve the experience of our Admin Area Settings by moving all sections into new, individual Settings sub-pages. This provides admins a time-saving shortcut to access any detail to manage.
At GitLab, we do our best to enable you to explore relevant and cool projects on your GitLab instance. With this release, a new filter “Most stars” provides an incredible useful filter to show projects most starred on your instance.
Thank you for this contribution, Jacopo Beschi!
We recently introduced a new code language bar on the Project overview page, providing a quick overview about programming languages involved.
With GitLab 11.4, we introduce an additional absolute measure by showing a new percentage value for each relevant code language shown. This provides a more quantitative view of your project’s technology stack.
Thank you for this contribution, Johann Hubert Sonntagbauer!
Two-factor authentication is a de facto standard for signing up for any relevant web-based application. At GitLab we understand and take this seriously. Whenever you set up a two-factor authentication initially, we provide limited recovery codes that allow you to regain access to your account as a fallback.
With this release, we now support download of recovery codes as a text file using the new “Download codes” button.
Thank you for this contribution, Luke Picciau!
The admin runner view now supports the ability to filter by runner type and state, giving you more options to manage especially large fleets of runners in your environment.
The interactive web terminals feature has been expanded to be compatible with Docker executors as well. For now, the Docker session is closed as soon as the script exits, but we are aiming to further improve this behavior by resolving #3605 in our next release.
Starting in 11.4 Auto DevOps will now evaluate the plan (GitLab.com) or tier (self-managed) for the instance in which it’s running in order to determine which jobs to skip. This will result in faster Auto DevOps pipeline when certain features are not in use.
This will not only save you time but will also result in a cleaner view of Auto DevOps pipeline, showing you only the relevant jobs for your project.
It is now possible to set a job to start after a delay
via the when keyword in .gitlab-ci.yml. The timer starts
ticking when the job would have otherwise started, giving you
control to implement tasks that need to wait for a period of time to occur - for
example, when implementing timed incremental rollouts, or any
other delays needed after performing some other action.
Interactive runbooks provide a powerful way for operators to interact with various systems to carry out common tasks such as diagnosing, deploying, and measuring infrastructure components.
The JupyterHub app offered via GitLab’s Kubernetes integration now ships with Nurtch’s Rubix library, providing a simple way to create DevOps runbooks. A sample runbook is provided, showcasing common operations.
License Management policy allows developers to define if they want to approve or blacklist a specific license for their project. This can be done as soon as a new license is introduced, directly in the merge request page. But sometimes project maintainers want to populate the list beforehand, so that developers already know if their changes are aligned with the policy.
In GitLab 11.4, we introduce the ability to add manual entries for License Management. Project maintainers can prefill the policy in the Settings > CI/CD > License Management page by choosing from a set of common licenses, or add a custom entry to that list.
With GitLab 11.4, configured alert thresholds are now displayed directly on the metrics charts. This allows easier determination of which metrics are currently generating alerts, and better visualization of the interplay of the metric and alert threshold.
Google’s keyboard, (not so) cleverly called Gboard, has been updated with a new floating keyboard function. It’s a tad complex to access: Hit the G in the upper left corner (or the arrow, depending on how you have it set up), hit the three dots, and press on the floating keyboard button.
From there you can resize it and move it around, taking up the part of the display that you want it to. It will go transparent after a short period of time to be a bit more out of your way.
It’s a simple and nice to have feature but it’s just annoying to get to. Nonetheless people with larger phones may appreciate it. Head to the Play Store to update Gboard and give it a shot!
Andrew H writes “this is an interface for one of our Spring Data repositories”. If you’ve ever looked at Spring’s documentation, you know the punchline. Spring has certain naming conventions that have become a notorious.
Spring Data is an ORM, and among other things, it allows you to design interfaces which are translated into a series of queries based on the naming conventions. So, for example, a method named findDistinctByTenantId would turn into a query in the database. It’s a useful convenience for simple CRUD operations, but for more complex queries, you’re still better off writing your SQL in an @Query annotation. SQL is still the best way to build complicated RDBMS queries.
That doesn’t mean you have to use SQL. Andrew’s co-worker provided this method:
public Page<Ad> findDistinctByTenantIdAndTitleIgnoreCaseContainingAndFlagsNotNullAndFlagsResolutionTypeValueOrTenantIdAndDescriptionIgnoreCaseContainingAndFlagsNotNullAndFlagsResolutionTypeValueOrTenantIdAndEmailIgnoreCaseContainingAndFlagsNotNullAndFlagsResolutionTypeValueOrTenantIdAndContactNameIgnoreCaseContainingAndFlagsNotNullAndFlagsResolutionTypeValue
(Long tenantId, String title, String resolutionTypeValue, Long tenantId2, String description, String resolutionTypeValue2, Long tenantId3, String email, String resolutionTypeValue3, Long tenantId4, String contactName, String resolutionTypeValue4, Pageable pageable);As an aside, this convention doesn’t let you reuse a parameter in multiple conditions, so those multiple tenantId, tenantId2, etc. parameters? They all need to get the same value. Ditto on all the resolutionTypeValue parameters. This may not be the longest method name ever, but it’s certainly a strong contender.
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Screaming Face Pillow – Nothing says Halloween like a screaming face in the middle of your living room
The post Screaming Face Pillow appeared first on Shut Up And Take My Money.
I’m writing this post while I sit under a mango tree and listen to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. I don’t have to worry about my music bothering anyone around me, and I don’t think twice about my attire (yoga pants, Beatles shirt, Time-Turner, and a pair of boots I'm trying to break in). I get to work wherever I’m most productive, because GitLab is an all-remote company. My 350 team members and I work wherever we’re most comfortable – whether that’s in a small cafe in Utrecht, Netherlands or in a bookstore in Santa Monica, California. We’re passionate about working remotely and believe that it has the power to change the workforce.
All-remote organizations empower team members to work in settings that allow them to balance their personal and professional lives. A completely remote environment allows organizations to retain team members as they move to be closer to parents, travel the world, or follow their significant other if they have a job transfer. People don’t have to choose between their happiness and their career.
"Remote working offers flexibility in every part of people’s lives. If you need to suddenly take care of your family or friends, the flexibility to travel to them, move to them, be there when they need you there. And I think that's a really beautiful thing." — Sid Sijbrandij
Equivalence: The problem with hybrid setups, in which there are a few remote workers who collaborate with a larger on-site team, is that the remote team feels isolated and often misses out on discussions. When there’s no HQ, no one is in a satellite office and everyone's on equal footing, so no one is left out of impromptu meetings over lunch or quick brainstorming sessions down the hall.
Communication: When everyone is remote, effective communication becomes a necessity, which helps instill good, scalable working practices. At GitLab, we document best practices in our handbook and we work in issues, allowing us to work asynchronously, which we need since we’re a global company with team members in every time zone. Working in issues means our discussions are written, so we don't endure long meetings, which run the risk of team members forgetting information or decisions.
Hiring: All-remote companies have an advantage over traditional work environments, because they can hire people irrespective of location, so they’re able to find the most talented people in the world rather than within a commutable distance.
Cost-effective: When you can hire around the world, you can pay market wages and offer people an at-market or above-market wage while still reducing costs for the company. Furthermore, without office rent, an organization saves a significant amount of money. GitLab, for example, has experienced rapid growth and would've had to move offices seven times in the last few years. We save a significant amount of money on rent, utilities, office equipment, and additional team members to manage the office.
The biggest disadvantage to remote working is that isolation can set in if there isn't a concerted effort to create a social connection between people. In a co-located company, people can mingle in break rooms, sit together at lunch, and briefly chat in hallways. At all-remote companies, the social fiber of a culture has to be actively cultivated and time must be set aside for it or team members will feel alone in their work and disconnected from the organization.
GitLab has Group Conversations every day at the time when West Coast and Europe overlap. The most-wanted hours in the company to organize meetings are dedicated to talking about different areas of the company and learning how they're performing. We also do a Company Call every day, which comprises about five minutes of announcements and 25 minutes of people chatting.
Our Coffee Break Calls encourage team members to spend several hours a week socializing and building a relationship that's separate from work. Since working remotely can also lead to team members never meeting in person, we have a visiting grant to cover transportation costs, and every nine months, the entire team gets together for the GitLab Summit.
When I worked in-office, there was a stigma to wanting to chat with people, because my manager would wonder why I wasn't working. Now, my manager praises my ability to connect with people. Our coffee chats give us permission to talk to team members about anything.
"Instead of it being a stigma, we support it. We force you to do it when you onboard by asking you to set up five coffee breaks with team members. It's totally legitimized, and everyone thinks it's acceptable. And, one thing I like a lot is that it's personal. People tell stories, and sometimes they're fun, sometimes they're beautiful, sometimes they're really sad, and I love them all." – Sid Sijbrandij
We'll admit that investors have expressed concern about our dreamy all-remote atmosphere. In considering GitLab, investors usually have these three concerns: we don't match their pattern, whether the executive team has enough interaction, and the 50 percent loss in value in case of an acquisition. Investors are interested in pattern-matching, and since the majority of their companies are traditional in-office organizations, investors are reluctant to deviate from what has historically worked well.
Sid replies to a Hacker News comment about all-remote companies.
When it comes to the executive team, investors wonder whether GitLab's leadership is able to effectively work together when they're distributed. Leadership needs high-bandwidth communication since they represent different functions, and in the eyes of investors, remote cultures are not conducive to this level of interaction. Our executive team has quarterly in-person meetings and regular video calls.
The concerns about acquisition are true, but they help both investors and GitLab determine whether their goals are aligned. When a company gets acquired, especially in the Bay Area, the presumption is that all the employees move to the acquiring company. This would be hard in our case – people don't have work visas, others are used to a remote lifestyle, and a lot of people just wouldn't want to move. The industry estimate is that an all-remote team halves the value of a company in the case of an acquisition. Although this may sound terrifying to some, this fact helps us select the investors that believe in our goal: to become a public company. So, if investors are interested in acquisition, investing with GitLab isn't the right move for them, because our goals are misaligned.
An increasing number of the workforce wants to be a part of a remote team. One study found that "searches for flexible work arrangements is up 32 percent year over year," an indication that the appeal of remote working is on the mind of jobseekers.
If you’re considering creating an all-remote environment, please borrow heavily from our 1,500-page handbook! We discuss which tools we use, our expense policy, and our onboarding template. If you think of ways we can improve our remote working culture, we’d love it if you contributed your thoughts!
Cover image by Domenico Loia, licensed under CC X.
The NVIDIA SHIELD remains perhaps the most updated Android device in history, with NVIDIA continually adding new features to the now over 3-year-old streaming box.
With the free Google Home Mini deal running for the SHIELD at the moment, it isn’t surprising to see further integrations arrive between the two. The latest update allows you to use any Google Home device to launch and control streaming apps on your SHIELD, like Netflix, HBO NOW, CBS, and Starz. You can jump straight into a specific show on any of those streaming apps just by saying “Ok Google, watch [Name of show] on SHIELD.”
Any app on your SHIELD can be simply launched using your voice by saying “OK Google, open [Name of app].” You will still need the remote to actually select something there, but it’ll get things going a bit faster as you track down the remote. If you lost the remote mid-show you can now pause and resume playback in any app as well as controlling the system volume and turning off the SHIELD completely.
Here’s a list of some of the new features available on SHIELD via Google Home this month. Just restart your SHIELD TV and the update should arrive for your device.
Basic Commands
Volume Control
Playback Features
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It’s hard to argue with the SHIELD TV as the best Android streaming box available, even 3 years later, thanks to NVIDIA’s continued commitment to the platform.
“Hey, Kim H, can you sit in on a tech-screen for a new hire?”
The Big Boss had a candidate they wanted hired, but before the hiring could actually happen, a token screening process needed to happen. Kim and a few other staffers were pulled in to screen the candidate, and the screen turned into a Blue Screen, because the candidate crashed hard. Everyone in the room gave them a thumbs down, and passed their report up the chain to the Big Boss.
The Big Boss ignored their comments and hired the candidate anyway. A week later, this ended up in source control:
public static ProductCodeModel GetProductCode(int id) {
for (int i = 0; i < GetProductCodes().size(); i++){
if(i==id) return GetProductCodes().get(i);
}
return null;
}Obviously, the loop is unnecessary. The real kicker is that GetProductCodes loads its data out of a file each time it’s called. It contains thousands of lines, which means to access any individual product, the entire file has to be read into memory, id times, and if it's the last product code in the datafile, you have read the file N times.
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The United States is starting to develop a grid of EV chargers for electric vehicles, thanks to the automobiles starting to become more prevalent on the streets. So of course Google is going to try and help with finding charging stations as people drive from one location to another.
That assistance comes in the form of Google Maps which, beginning today, will show EV charging stations within the app. All you have to do is search for something like “EV charging stations” and the locations in your area will pop up.
Going further, the search results will show information about the business where the charging station is location, what kind of charging ports are available, the number of ports available for visitors, charging speeds, and more. Reviews for the charging stations, photos, and ratings will be available to see as well.
Globally, the search results within Google Maps support charging stations from Tesla and Chargepoint. In the United States there is charging station location information from SemaConnect, Blink, and EVgo as well. In Australia and New Zealand there is additional location info from Chargefox. And finally, in the United Kingdom Google Maps users can find charging station location from Pod Point and Chargemaster.
The new search feature is available for Android and iOS users beginning today. The same ability to search for EV charging stations will be available on the desktop “in the coming weeks”.
Forgive me; this is a low, vulgar post, but in me, as in most of us, there is an inner twelve-year-old who will not be entirely suppressed, and he enjoys Albert Stern’s A Deep Dive Into Uranus Jokes so much he has to share it. The first line will suggest the style: “Uranus, it has been pointed out, has long been the butt of jokes.” Now that you have been warned, here are some excerpts:
My own introduction to Uranus jokes must have come close to half a century ago, and certainly the playground comedian who related the jape was working solidly within a received older tradition. But how old might that tradition be?
Certainly, no planet Uranus joke can predate March 13, 1781, as that was when astronomer Sir William Herschel first discovered the celestial body from the garden of his house in Bath, England. Okay then, you say — the tradition started March 14, 1781. But the story of the planet’s nomenclature is more involved, as Herschel didn’t just peer through his telescope and say “I can see Uranus.” The astronomer’s name for the object he discovered (and at first misidentified as a comet) was Georgium Sidus, after King George III. According to Mark Littmann in his 2004 tome Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System, that appellation proved “instantly unpopular” wherever the monarch did not reign. German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, one of the first observers to properly identify the body as the seventh planet from the sun, named it Uranus after the father of Saturn and grandfather of Jupiter in ancient Roman cosmology. However, writes Littmann, “The new planet remained officially ‘The Georgian’ in Britain until after the discovery of Neptune and through the 1847 publication of the Nautical Almanac for 1851.” […]
I was set on the circuitous path to the first Uranus joke by sheer chance, via a history book for general readers titled 100 Diagrams That Changed the World. In it, author Scott Christianson identifies the first print appearance of an emoticon […] Emoticons first appeared in an American satirical magazine called Puck on March 30, 1881.
What do emoticons have to do with anything? Because Stern, in idly perusing the page of Puck reproduced by Christianson, discovered the first known Uranus joke on the same page! I leave you to learn the details, and be exposed to many Uranus-related turns of phrase, at the link. (A tip o’ the Languagehat hat to DyRE’s MetaFilter post, My what will be at right angles?)
Sears has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to close hundreds of stores in an effort to keep the company afloat. The Sears catalog is perhaps one of the most important and under-appreciated innovations in American life. Starting in 1888 with a mailer advertising watches and jewelry, Sears introduced millions of Americans to in-home shopping by using the growing networks of the railroad and US Postal Service, much like Amazon and other retailers would using the internet decades later.
The time was right for mail order merchandise. Fueled by the Homestead Act of 1862, America’s westward expansion followed the growth of the railroads. The postal system aided the mail order business by permitting the classification of mail order publications as aids in the dissemination of knowledge entitling these catalogs the postage rate of one cent per pound. The advent of Rural Free Delivery in 1896 also made distribution of the catalog economical.
As historian Louis Hyman explained on Twitter, the way Sears sold goods to their customers also provided new opportunities for black Southerners living under the Jim Crow system.
Every time a black southerner went to the local store they were confronted with forced deference to white customers who would be served first. The stores were not self-service, so the black customers would have to wait. And then would have to ask the proprietor to give them goods (often on credit because…sharecropping). The landlord often owned the store. In every way shopping reinforced hierarchy. Until Sears.
The catalog undid the power of the storekeeper, and by extension the landlord. Black families could buy without asking permission. Without waiting. Without being watched. With national (cheap) prices!
This excellent piece by Antonia Noori Farzan has more info. Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of blind auditions, the practice of auditioning orchestra musicians behind a screen to help cut down on gender bias during the hiring process. While not entirely free of bias — opportunities for discrimination by postal workers and Sears employees were still possible — the Sears ordering process was essentially a blind retail transaction, a screen placed between the store and black customers. (The catalog also advertised racist costumes so obviously Sears wasn’t some bastion of social progressivism…they simply wanted to sell more goods to more kinds of people.)
According to Sears historian Jerry Hancock, Sears also developed a policy to help those who couldn’t read or write that well to be able to place orders:
One of Hancock’s discoveries was Sears’ response to the needs of a rural South in which literacy was rare. For someone who could neither read nor write, placing orders and following written protocols were problematic. Richard Sears responded with a policy that his company would fill any order it received, no matter what the medium or format. So, country folks who were once too daunted to send requests to other purveyors could write in on a scrap of paper, asking humbly for a pair of overalls, size large. And even if it was written in broken English or nearly illegible, the overalls would be shipped.
Music scholar Ted Gioia notes that blues musicians were able to buy instruments from Sears that were unavailable to them from local retailers.
With Sears declaring bankruptcy, it’s worth remembering how much impact this company had on American music. In my research into blues and other traditional styles, I found that many, many musicians started out on Sears instruments.
Even under Jim Crow, music was an avenue for upward mobility for African Americans, and Sears and other mail-order retailers were more than happy to provide them with instruments.
Tags: Antonia Noori Farzan business Jerry Hancock Louis Hyman music racism Sears Ted GioiaAs Eric Levitz writes in a piece called Millennials Need to Start Voting Before the Gerontocracy Kills Us All, younger Americans are under-represented in American political life.
The United States, circa 2018, looks like a place run by people who know they’re going to die soon.
As “once in a lifetime” storms crash over our coasts five times a year - and the White House’s own climate research suggests that human civilization is on pace to perish before Barron Trump — our government is subsidizing carbon emissions like there’s no tomorrow. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is already “below standard,” and set to further deteriorate, absent hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment. Many of our public schools can’t afford to stock their classrooms with basic supplies, pay their teachers a living wage, or keep their doors open five days a week. Child-care costs are skyrocketing, the birth rate is plunging, and the baby boomers, retiring. And, amid it all, our congressional representatives recently decided that the best thing they could possibly do with $1.5 trillion of borrowed money was to give large tax breaks to people like themselves.
See also Dear Young People: Don’t Vote. As Levitz says though, one of the reasons that young people don’t vote is that it’s often more difficult for them than for older people. Making it easier for everyone to vote would alleviate many of these concerns and result in higher turnout, more political engagement, and better representation for young Americans.
Millennials in the U.S. are more underrepresented than their peers in most other developed countries. Primary responsibility for this fact lies with our nation’s political parties, which have made America an exceptionally difficult place to cast a ballot. If Democrats wish to increase turnout among the young, they’d be well advised to implement automatic voter registration, a new Voting Rights Act, and a federal holiday on the first Tuesday in November, when and if they have the power to do so.
Inflexible work schedules, lack of transportation, voter ID laws, fewer polling places, etc…it amounts to voter suppression of young people.
Voter suppression is often, correctly, viewed through a racial or class-based lens — however, these same laws also target younger people. A group that tends to vote more often for third-party and Democratic candidates.
For example, states such as Texas and Ohio require voter identification at the polling place — a college or university ID doesn’t qualify. In Wisconsin, voter ID laws permitted college IDs but not out-of-state drivers licenses, which, local news reported, resulted in many university students getting turned away in the April 2016 primary. In North Carolina, another key state in the Electoral College, hundreds of students cast provisional ballots in 2016, unsure whether their vote would even count because of their strict voter ID laws — which were struck down this year by the Supreme Court, but not before disenfranchising potentially thousands of American citizens.
(thx kate & @lauraolin)
Tags: Eric Levitz politics USADan JonesI find this super fascinating
The Internet connects various bodies of knowledge and enables all sorts of private communication and coordination. It’s also clear in 2018, and has been for twenty-five years, that the Internet supports a variety of social media: public and semi-public communication for entertainment and cultural purposes.
Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol and general internet pioneer, traces the emerging social use of the Internet to an unlikely candidate: a 1979 chain email from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence labs, titled “SF-LOVERS,” that asked Cerf and his colleagues at DARPA and elsewhere in the network of networks called ARPANET to weigh in on their favorite science fiction authors.
Because the message had gone out to the entire network, everybody’s answers could then be seen and responded to by everybody else. Users could also choose to send their replies to just one person or a subgroup, generating scores of smaller discussions that eventually fed back into the whole.
About 40 years later, Cerf still recalls this as the moment he realized that the internet would be something more than every other communications technology before it. “It was clear we had a social medium on our hands,” he said.
The thread was a hit. It also created what might be thought of as the first online social network. Though individuals had been connected via this internet before, this was the first time they were using it for social interactions and, importantly, building a larger community identity through these personal connections. After SF-LOVERS came YUMYUM, another chain email that debated the quality of restaurants in the new Silicon Valley. (In-house gourmet chefs were still decades away.) Then WINE-TASTERS appeared, its purpose self-evident. The socialization also inspired more science with HUMAN-NETS, a community for researchers to discuss the human factors of these proto-online communities.
In the 1980s, these chain emails saw the first use of spoiler alerts, for the death of Spock in The Wrath of Khan (oops, sorry if I spoiled that for you), and emoticons: “:-)” to indicate a joke and “:-(” to indicate a non-joke. (I’d say the semantics of those has drifted over the years.)
And here we are, almost forty years later, still doing the same shit, only with slightly more sophistication and bandwidth, on the commercial successors to those early email threads.
Tags: history internet science fiction
Back in 2014, SanDisk became the first to offer a 128GB microSD card. The price? $199.99. Fast forward to today, and the same card with the same certifications (and a new coat of paint) is going for a paltry $24.87, just 12.4% of the original MSRP, on Amazon. That's pretty crazy to think about.
This card carries Class 10 and U1 ratings, meaning that it has a minimum sequential writing speed of 10MB/s.
Read More[Deal Alert] 128GB SanDisk Ultra microSD card is just $25 on Amazon was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
